New York Yankees' Alex Rodriguez looks on during the third inning of a baseball game against the Chicago White Sox in Chicago, Monday, Aug. 5, 2013. (AP Photo/Paul Beaty)

SAN BERNARDINO – Before he made the 2,500-mile trip from Maui to San Bernardino for the Little League Western Regional, Glen Chong had a candid conversation with his son.

Knowing baseball’s significance to his son would prompt an honest answer, he swallowed broached an uncomfortable subject that has been associated with the sport all of Jacob Chong’s life – performance enhancing drugs.

“He’s pretty good and, sure, I wonder why he’s good,” Glen Chong said of his son, a member of Central East Maui Little League. “‘I told him ‘If there’s anything, supplements or something like that in your system, you need to tell me now.’ He looked at me like I was crazy.”

It may sound farfetched, but Glen Chong refuses to ignore the potential reach of performance enhancing drugs, particularly considering the blurry line between what is legal and what isn’t.

For the 11- and 12-year-olds living their dream at Al Houghton Stadium this week in hopes of advancing to the Little League World Series, the steroid era is all they’ve known.

Though Little League is baseball in its purist form, the truth for parents is that the sport has lost so much of that purity.

On the day 13 Major League Baseball players, including Alex Rodriguez, were suspended due to their ties to performance enhancing drugs, one little leaguer didn’t think the punishment was harsh enough.

“I think since A-Rod got suspended – he’s been taking performance enhancers for a while – I think if you’re going to suspend you should take away his baseball career,” Northenn California’s Belmont-Redwood Shores second baseman Noah Marcelo said. “He’s never going to learn if you just keep on suspending him. Maybe not a lifetime (suspension) but at least a decent amount of time.”

At least five years before he became a member of the Mountain Ridge Little League All-Star team from Nevada, Ryan Lystlund was aware his favorite players was associated with steroids.

“He used to ask me for the sports page and I’d tell him ‘The stinking neighbors stole our paper again,’” Ryan’s father, George Lystlund, said. “I tried to shield him from it as long as I could. But he found out when somebody was talking about Roger Clemens one day and it just crushed him. He’s a purist and he immediately called out players for cheating. I’m proud of him for his response and the way he looks at it now as it’s going on.”

Ryan Lystlund was expressly proud of Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who was outspoken about his disappointment in the dishonesty of Milwaukee Brewers’ Ryan Braun before he was suspended earlier this season for his link to performance enhancing drugs. Had his friend done the same, Ryan Lystlund told his father he would have spoken out against him.

It saddens him that his son’s baseball experience is so littered with scandal, but George Lystlund sees clearly that his son is learning.

“He said ‘If my buddy lied to me and made me look like a fool, I’d do the same thing.’” George Lystlund said. “Granted the harsh realities of life nowadays is exposed, but it’s teaching him a life lesson. It’s teaching that your word means something. If your buddy tells you something, it should mean something.”

As a teenager, Glen Chong was a 5-foot-6 pitcher who twice went to the Pony League World Series. Even in the early 1980s, supplements weren’t foreign to the 13-and 14-year-olds trying to get an edge.

Glen Chong wants his son to be on the cutting edge with his training, but the line is more blurred than ever between what’s cheating and what isn’t.

“There’s a fine line between performance enhancement and steroids,” Glen Chong said. “Last year it wouldn’t be called a steroid but this year it is a steroid. I tell Jacob that what these guys are doing is cheating but I tell him I’m willing to buy him vitamins, you know, at GNC. But it’s scary because you never know what’s going to be banned tomorrow.”

Chong’s direct approach with his son is likely the exception given the youthful innocence of those involved in Little League, but it’s well known that those much younger than those competing at Al Houghton Stadium are exposed to the presence of performance enhancing drugs in baseball.